In other starcraft news, it looks like MLG Anaheim is going to be a big deal -- Heart of the Swarm show match, Korean broodwar pro's are switching to SC2 and are going to be there, and CBS interactive signed a deal to broadcast it. Supposedly Blizzard, Kespa and MLG have a big announcement later this week.posted by empath at 9:15 AM on April 27, 2012

In other starcraft news, it looks like MLG Anaheim is going to be a big deal -- Heart of the Swarm show match, Korean broodwar pro's are switching to SC2 and are going to be there, and CBS interactive signed a deal to broadcast it. Supposedly Blizzard, Kespa and MLG have a big announcement later this week.

I love that Pro Starcraft is a thing because it's pretty much the only corner of the nerd universe that I don't know anything about. When I read this post I know what normal people hear when I talk about Ferengis and nethack conducts.posted by theodolite at 9:19 AM on April 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

Any hints as to when the Zerg expansion will be out?

It's going to be 9 months at least. They're going to do a long beta test ahead of time to get the multiplayer balance right. It'll probably be 6 months after release before any major tourneys switch to it.posted by empath at 9:19 AM on April 27, 2012

Bleagh. Oh well, based on the leaked story, it's nothing to look forward to. :(posted by longdaysjourney at 9:20 AM on April 27, 2012

I love that Pro Starcraft is a thing because it's pretty much the only corner of the nerd universe that I don't know anything about.

Short explanation of everything I just said-- All the best players from Starcraft 1 are Korean, and most of them have not switched to competing in Starcraft 2 yet. MLG is the biggest american tournament series, and Kespa is the largest Starcraft 1 organization in Korea, and they've scheduled a big announcement for this week. Heart of the Swarm is the first expansion for Starcraft 2.posted by empath at 9:22 AM on April 27, 2012

I love that Pro Starcraft is a thing because it's pretty much the only corner of the nerd universe that I don't know anything about

I think you can quite easily be sat there in your Firefly T-shirt and no pants in front of a computer you scratch built yourself, drinking whatever the equivalent of Jolt cola is now that sort of thing is the domain of brogrammers, eating serial you bought for the Green Lantern toy, watching Pro Starcraf on Youtube and saying "Wow, those guys are quite nerdy."posted by Artw at 9:23 AM on April 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

your Firefly T-shirt and no pants in front of a computer you scratch built yourself, drinking whatever the equivalent of Jolt cola is now that sort of thing is the domain of brogrammers, eating serial you bought for the Green Lantern toy

Inertia. And it's just a different game. Anybody switching would go from being the best in the world at one game to just being very good at two of them for a while.posted by empath at 9:40 AM on April 27, 2012

Malor - basically imagine if basketball had been made by a company 20 years ago. When that company makes basketball 2, but the basketball 1 audience is still going strong and the established pros are still making the same income, there's no reason for them to switch to bball2. What you get are the folks that never quite made it at the highest levels of bball1 dominating bball2, and that's what's going on.

I get the impression that some of these folks have entire maps, or at least the frantic openings, as muscle memory and that's got to take some time to train.posted by Artw at 9:57 AM on April 27, 2012

@Malor: There's some awkwardness in SC2 that wasn't there in SC vanilla. The expansion may fix things like BW fixed StarCraft vanilla, but Terran seemed to have been the only developed faction in SC2 with zerg and protoss feeling undeveloped. I haven't played recently, but zerg felt awkward because of a lot of their mechanics now involved making creep highways. Zerg was a harasser in StarCraft BW, but it feels as if they were put on the defensive until they can get creep tunnels going.

They're taking out units in HoS, including the iconic carrier. They never had to phase out units in BW.posted by DetriusXii at 9:59 AM on April 27, 2012

I'm not even that good (I made it as high as #1 platinum one season) and I'm mostly operating on muscle memory. You don't have time to think about anything once you get to even that level, if you hesitate or make even one mistake, you just lose.posted by empath at 10:00 AM on April 27, 2012

I haven't played recently, but zerg felt awkward because of a lot of their mechanics now involved making creep highways. Zerg was a harasser in StarCraft BW, but it feels as if they were put on the defensive until they can get creep tunnels going.

Zerg is very reactive in sc2. The 'standard' Zerg strategy is to build as many workers and bases as you can early on while building as few army units as you can to survive. It depends on a lot of scouting so you know exactly when to build units to defend and whicih units to build.

There are one and two base super aggressive builds that zerg can do, but they're really only used keep your opponent honest in multi-game series so they have to scout you and build defenses. They basically only win if your opponent didn't build any defenses and didn't scout it.posted by empath at 10:09 AM on April 27, 2012

In a strange reverse of the status quo, for once I had to explain something my students found on reddit, rather than the other way around.posted by robocop is bleeding at 10:16 AM on April 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Malor - basically imagine if basketball had been made by a company 20 years ago. When that company makes basketball 2, but the basketball 1 audience is still going strong and the established pros are still making the same income, there's no reason for them to switch to bball2. What you get are the folks that never quite made it at the highest levels of bball1 dominating bball2, and that's what's going on.

This is also why Sony missed the boat on portable digital music players and RIM fell into the harbor on smartphones.posted by notyou at 10:29 AM on April 27, 2012

In other starcraft news, it looks like MLG Anaheim is going to be a big deal -- Heart of the Swarm show match, Korean broodwar pro's are switching to SC2 and are going to be there, and CBS interactive signed a deal to broadcast it. Supposedly Blizzard, Kespa and MLG have a big announcement later this week.

Hi, I work for MLG! I can't comment on anything that hasn't already been announced but yeah, Anaheim is probably going to be the biggest event in eSports since forever. Extremely excited for HOTS to be on the show floor.posted by shmegegge at 10:34 AM on April 27, 2012

I assumed this would be a "do a barrel-roll" style gimmick with actual zerglings swarming across your screen.

Instead, it's the most succinct possible demonstration of why I could never enjoy playing real-time strategy games. clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick clickclickclickposted by straight at 10:40 AM on April 27, 2012

Detrius XII and empath:

so, blizzard tends to balance the game for top-level professional play, and while there have been a lot of patches and some resultant periods of race imbalance, the most recent patch has made things pretty well balanced. witness that our most recent tournaments have had a reasonably even distribution of races in the top 12-16 players. for example: Zerg were in bad shape for a while, but the most recent patch nerfed ghost snipes, so broodlord strats against terran are now a much more viable strategy.posted by shmegegge at 10:40 AM on April 27, 2012

so, blizzard tends to balance the game for top-level professional play

I don't think this is strictly true. They've patched stuff in the past because of 2v2 imbalances, even...posted by empath at 12:41 PM on April 27, 2012

If anyone is interested, I'm Renoroc on Starcraft II.posted by Renoroc at 12:43 PM on April 27, 2012

None of this made any sense to me, since I'm 100% square and old, so here's the newspaper's gloss on what's going on:
"In the popular real-time strategy genre of video games, the term "rush" is applied to any tactic in which you aim several of your battle units at your enemy at once, immediately overpowering them through sheer weight of numbers. In the hugely successful real-time strategy game Star Craft, it's a common tactic used by the alien race known as the Zergs." In this Google thing, "O"s fill the screen and you can kill them by clicking on them several times.posted by LobsterMitten at 1:19 PM on April 27, 2012

so, blizzard tends to balance the game for top-level professional play

I loved the single player of Starcraft BW and I'm still kind of pissed that Blizzard nerfed their own story. There is a betrayal that was telegraphed on day 0, a big part of SC's story is undone (the Raynor-Mengsk conflict and Kerrigan's ascendancy), and two of the main characters suddenly change from their confident, proactive selves into set pieces waiting for years until the player meets them again. Ugh.posted by ersatz at 1:43 PM on April 27, 2012

Fuck it, nuke 'em. Nuke all of 'em, our own included.posted by pyrex at 1:43 PM on April 27, 2012

Zerg were in bad shape for a while, but the most recent patch nerfed ghost snipes, so broodlord strats against terran are now a much more viable strategy.

Not that I'm accusing you of this (I understood all that) but I find the biggest obstacle to my becoming harder-core / more involved with online gaming (I play SC2 + SWTOR currently) is the insane degree to which people use shorthand (often mixed with typos, so you can never be sure which it is) on MMO or RTS forums.

I'm a reading-oriented learner so I really do need good forums and strategy explanations, but even so-called "casual-friendly" stuff seems to slip into jargon and shorthand without explaining it. I mean, I program incredibly complicated Japanese synthesizers with machine-translated documentation for a living, but when I see something that looks like this:

...I kind of sit there blinking for a few seconds before logging out of the game and going back to work.posted by jake at 2:12 PM on April 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

I don't think this is strictly true.

no, not strictly, but there is a tendency. sometimes something that helps newer players beat one particular race isn't as much of an issue when you see the top-level guys who are able to routinely get past it without a problem. this is why some cheese-style play can be affected by a patch, whereas things that simply aren't effective once you develop enough skill to overcome it don't really need to get fixed.posted by shmegegge at 3:48 PM on April 27, 2012

I'm a reading-oriented learner so I really do need good forums and strategy explanations, but even so-called "casual-friendly" stuff seems to slip into jargon and shorthand without explaining it. I mean, I program incredibly complicated Japanese synthesizers with machine-translated documentation for a living, but when I see something that looks like this

If its third and goal and behind by a field goal with a few seconds to go before the half ado you take a knee and the try an option on fourth down or do you just take the easy three and then hope the other team doesn't get a td on the return?posted by empath at 4:04 PM on April 27, 2012

Yes, it seems to be just as common among sports fans. I suspect it's because people see the highest-level competitive experts using jargon, and they want to be seen as experts too. I've never experienced that level of "competitive shop-talking fandom" on, say, model train enthusiast or DIY electronics forums, with the occasional exception (to whom everyone replies with "whaaaat? English please!")posted by jake at 5:46 PM on April 27, 2012

People talk that way because it's precise and efficient, not to make it harder for outsiders to understand. You can watch an hour or so of casts from Husky or any of Day 9's videos if you want a primer on what it's all about. They tend to explain a lot of the terminology as they go.

Just as an example, a six-pool is when, as a Zerg, you build a Spawning pool when you only have six workers. The spawning pool is the Zerg building that lets you build attacking units. In general, when you say "number"-"building"' it basically explains what how fast you start making an army. The sooner you make it, the more you are sacrificing your later economy for an early military advantage. If you aren't zerg, usually the earliest you'll see is a 10-barracks (10 rax). You actually start with six workers, so with a six pool, you're basically making an army before you do anything, and well before its really even possible for other races.

It's an extremely high risk, high reward move, and makes for a game that is going to be over in 5 minutes, rather than the typical 15 minute game. It's also pretty much the definition of a 'Zerg rush'

That's a lot to explain, and by the time you did it during a game, the game would be over. But you really only need to explain it once.

So when a caster says-"uh oh, looks like DRG is six pooling", the crowd is already on the edge of their seats, and the caster has time to get into all the intricacies of the implementation-- whether his opponent scouts it, whether DRG pulls his workers to attack or expands behind it, and so on.

The casters explain as much as they can in the time they have, but basically if you want to get into it, it's just like an other sport. Either you need to play, or you need to be willing to have no idea what's going on until you've watched a few hours of games.

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